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46 MYROUSESEVERYDAY JULY | AUGUST 2016
the Cocktail issue
Sugar Cane
In South Louisiana, as elsewhere throughout the Americas, sugar is white gold, the
commodity primarily responsible for much of the region’s early economic, social and
cultural development. The first century of Louisiana’s settlement and history can be
seen as a great sugar experiment, an attempt to transform the colony into the next
great sugar empire. Louisiana’s founding fathers, the Le Moyne brothers, Iberville and
Bienville both attempted and failed in planting cane in the area. Jesuit priests later,
with minor successes, cultivated the crop where New Orleans’s modern-day Central
Business District now stands.
Up until the 1790s when the planter Étienne de Boré triumphantly produced the first
batch of granulated Louisiana sugar and thus sparked a homegrown industry, the Le
Moynes, the Jesuits and the dozens of other farmers who endeavored to grow healthy
cane crops all had one goal in mind: rum. The fermented and distilled product of
molasses and/or sugarcane juice, rum, the early colonists thought, could make them
rich. It would also, at the very least, get them quite inebriated. “The immoderate use
of taffia (a kind of rum),” the French administrator Jean Jacques D’Abbadie wrote
concerning Louisianians in 1764, “has stupefied the whole population.”
—Rien Fertel, My Rouses Magazine, 2013
Donner-Peltier Distillers
Thibodaux, LA
Rouses Rob Barrilleaux recently sat down
with Beth Donner, one of four owners of
the distillery. Additional reporting by Anna
Gourgues.
ROB BARRILLEAUX: Beth, how did you
guys come to the decision to open a distillery?
There’s nothing in your backgrounds that
says distiller. You studied international
trade and finance. Your husband Tom is a
neurosurgeon.Henry Peltier is a pediatrician,
his wife, Jennifer, is a nurse.
BETH DONNER: We were on vacation
in Puerto Rico with the Peltiers. My
husband,Tom, was doing an Iron Man race.
Everywhere we’d go on the islands, they
made rum because of course they have sugar
cane there. Tom said, ‘we live in the middle
of sugar cane country, why don’t we try to
make rum?’ The rest is history.
ROB: From the beginning you all made a
true commitment to use South Louisiana
ingredients. The sugarcane is grown right
outside your distillery. Where do you get
the rice for your Oryza vodka and gin? Am
I right that you also use the rice in your LA
1 whiskey?
BETH: We knew we wanted to use local
ingredients. Sometimes people think local
means more expensive, but staying local
doesn’t add to our expenses—it’s actually
a good thing. We are two miles from the
sugar cane get our rice from Reyne,
which is pretty close as well. Nine percent
of the rice we buy goes into our whiskey.
ROB: I know you sell a lot of that sugarcane
vodka ...
BETH: Vodka is the most common base for
cocktails. It’s a neutral spirit so it doesn’t
have any kind of flavor to it, unless its a
flavored vodka. It mixes well, and it works
well for a martini, chilled or straight up on
the rocks.
ROB: But gin is different. Gin has flavor. In
fact,every ginhas a unique flavor—Tanqueray
doesn’t taste like Hendrick’s. Hendrick’s
doesn’t taste like Bombay Saphire. What are
the flavors in your Oryza Gin?
BETH: Ours isn’t a typical London dry type
of gin. It has a citrus flavor to it which makes
it really unique compared to the other gins
out there. We’re in line with the local aspect
by using fresh satsuma along with the other
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